A few things I've learned about North Dakota:
1. Everyone has a dog. And if they don't have a dog, they have a cat.
2. The squirrels here are HUGE. I saw one walking on a fence and seriously thought it was a cat for a moment.
3. Pants and shirts are completely optional, especially if you're 12 or younger and even when it's 30 degrees outside.
4. Smoking and drinking are the official state hobbies (because there's nothing else to do, and anything there is to do would be greatly enhanced by intoxication).
Really, though, I think North Dakota's growing on me a little bit. I'm getting more used to the flatness of it all, though I still miss my mountains. The weather's been super weird lately. It was like 25 degrees and snowing early this week and then it's been up in the 60s and 70s the last couple of days. The wind is pretty impressive most days. Our apartment is right by a middle school and Sister Wells and I watched a tumbleweed relay this morning as they all blew across the track at high speeds. It's exciting in a skirt sometimes.
I've started to notice the weird mix of culture of here a little bit more this week. There's lots of German and Norwegian people, but there's also tons of Native American influence. For every Buchmiller and Feist there's several Blackclouds, Eagles, and Wise Spirits. People's houses are decorated with strange assortments of Native American blankets and artifacts. But everyone has the same accent, which is very rapidly becoming my accent. Had no idea that it would rub off on me so quickly, but sometimes I have to stop and ask Sister Wells if she notices the weird way I say things. It's going to be pretty ridiculous by the time I get back.
I was also not expecting the number of Africans I'd see. There's a lot of refugees that end up here, apparently. One of our investigators, Dehdeh, is from Liberia, and we just met someone from Cameroon the other day. Speaking of Dehdeh, she came to church on Sunday! We were worried that she wouldn't come because she was late. She missed the sacrament, which was too bad because that's the most important part, but she stayed for the speakers. I was super worried that she wasn't getting anything out of the meeting, because it was the most Mormon sacrament meeting I've been to in a long time. It was all about the youth and encouraging them to be great people and how we have to defend our homes from the influence of "the world," and we sang a bunch of hymns that nobody knew, so it just sounded like the whole congregation had never been to church before. Anyway, I was super worried about what she was getting from it, but we were talking afterwards and she said that she really enjoyed it. She was a young mom and raising your kids to make their own good decisions is super important to her. So it went better than expected. The struggle with Dehdeh is that she believes that it doesn't matter where you worship God as long as you worship Him, so all churches are kind of the same to her. Hopefully we can help her understand the importance of God's authority and Priesthood keys and all that fun stuff. She's super warm and open, so hopefully we can help her view this a little bit more seriously.
Other interesting news from this week: we got a new car! Well, new to us. We were driving a Nissan Rougue, but then the mission office had us trade with some of the elders. So now we have a Jeep Compass, which we've named The Liahona (because it's a compass, get it? Sister Myers is clever.) We call him Leo and we quite like him.
We also got a new companion for a little while, which was interesting. The mission recently assigned two elders and one sister (Sister Shaver) to be "traveling missionaries." Basically they go around to the different areas and help other missionaries work and make sure everyone's doing okay. They're like missionaries for the missionaries, because it's really easy to get discouraged in this mission with everything being so small and so spread apart. So because we have one of the larger apartments and we're close to the mission home, we became Sister Shaver's home base and she stayed with us for a few days. Not gonna lie, there was kind of an uncomfortable power dynamic with us for the first little while. Sister Shaver's been out for 17 months, so she's really, really motivated and used to everything, and so it would have been easy for her to take over. But she was trying really hard to kind of lead from the back and let us continue to do our own work, and I think Sister Wells had a hard time adjusting to having someone so much more experienced than her as part of a companionship. And then there was me, caught in the middle, having essentially no influence because let's be real, I can't find my way to the church building on my own at this point. We kind of got into the rhythm of it after a while and learned some useful things from Sister Shaver, which was nice. Hopefully we can continue to implement those things now that she's off traveling again.
Okay, to address the subject line: Sister Wells and I went to visit a less-active member who happened to live in a trailer park. It was getting dark out, but it was pretty warm and it's a nicer trailer park, so we weren't too worried about it. We parked and were about to pray, but then Sister Wells was just staring out the window with this look of abject terror on her face. So I looked where she was looking and saw this horrifying face staring at us from one of the trailer windows. The TV was on, so it had this flickering blueish tint and these black hole eyes and it was the creepiest thing in the world. It just got scarier and scarier the more we watched it. So we moved the car to the other side of the street and made our contact, knocked on a couple other doors, and then got out of there. We went back a couple days later to go tracting and it turns out that the creepy thing was a little gold elephant statue sitting on a table. Sister Shaver wasn't with us at night, so she thought we were so silly, but I'm telling you, it was the creepiest thing. If we're ever there in the night again, I'm going to try to take a picture of it because it's the worst. I think this is the first time I've ever been actually excited about daylight savings because it means that when we're out tracting past eight we won't have to do it in the dark.
Thanks for your continuing support! The work is moving pretty slowly and I'm still trying to find that balance between being myself and being a missionary. Had a really rough time partway through this week, but after a priesthood blessing things started to improve. Working on being motivated and trying to love the people even if they don't quite love me!
I forgot to add my apartment number to the address I gave a few people last time, so here's the real address:
Sister Myers
1619 31st St NW #205
Mandan, ND 58554
If you sent anything to the address without the apartment number, please let me know. It's maybe kind of lost. You're welcome to send things to the apartment address until we get close to transfers, and then things get a little dicey. I'll get the mission office address as soon as I have it.
Until next week! You're all amazing! I'm going to try to make these emails shorter because they take me forever to write.
Sister Myers
PS - If you haven't seen the church's new Easter video, go watch it, because it's pretty amazing. Seriously. Watch it, share it. #hallelujah
And you should all find a way to watch the MoTab broadcast! They're doing a Messiah sing-along. I have no idea where it's being broadcast because being a full-time servant of the Lord strangely means that you're entirely cut off from any source that will tell you when anything happens in the church, but it's on the 25th and I think it's going to be great.
